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El-Fasher’s fall did not close a chapter so much as open a wider, already festering wound. Satellite imagery and on-the-ground reports show clusters of probable bodies and newly dug mass graves around the Sudanese city. Local monitors report thousands killed since the siege began, while health workers and patients were murdered or abducted and hospitals ransacked. The horrors of El-Fasher were not isolated, spontaneous battlefield excesses but deliberate operations in a systematic campaign to wipe whole communities from Sudan’s map — and its future.
What the Rapid Support Forces’ conduct in Darfur signals is a return to the techniques of ethnic targeting first seen in the early 2000s and again in El-Geneina in 2023, where about 15,000 Masalit people were massacred. The pattern is clear: siege, blockade, selective slaughter, and then monopolize the territory’s governance and resources. When a paramilitary group couples battlefield success with control of food routes and aid denial, sanctioned violence and mass civilian deaths become a tool of consolidation.
The planning behind the fall of El-Fasher is as brutal as it is straightforward. The city was the last major Sudanese Armed Forces garrison in Darfur, and its capture now means the RSF can redirect its fighters, drones, and logistics toward new targets. The redeployments telegraph an imminent escalation of the RSF’s signature tactics: the encirclement of population centers, weaponization of starvation through siege barriers, and subsequent massacre of civilians.
In El-Fasher alone, the RSF’s 18-month siege, which included constructing 35 miles of barriers to block aid and escape, was followed by mass executions of at least 1,500 people in the first three days after the city’s fall. The group’s established pattern of house-to-house executions in non-Arab neighborhoods, as seen previously in El-Geneina, provides a clear blueprint for what awaits other communities. Operational momentum gained from El-Fasher’s capture directly translates into a repeat of this sequence of atrocities for towns in the RSF’s path.
We can expect a rapid spread of suffering. RSF control in Darfur creates corridors that link western fronts to central Sudan. Those corridors make it easier for the RSF to project force toward population centers in Kordofan and to threaten logistical hubs such as El-Obeid. The Sudanese Armed Forces’ likely counteroffensives will drive more civilians from frontlines into already overstretched urban shelters or across borders. The dynamic is one of movement and multiplication: One city conquered fuels the next offensive, spawning multiple new crises.
Beyond Sudan’s borders, spillovers are no longer hypothetical. Chad, which shares a 1,360 km border with Sudan’s Darfur region, serves as a primary logistical corridor for the RSF and hosts a massive influx of displaced people. The arrival of more than 100,000 people in a short period has overwhelmed local resources and crippled host communities, inciting local tensions. Such chaos is ripe for exploitation by armed groups seeking to profit from despair.
Meanwhile, tribal militias, some trained in neighboring Eritrea, operate across borders, while Libyan factions facilitate the flow of weapons to the warring parties, and paying migrants out. In South Sudan, the sabotage of oil pipelines has severely damaged the economy, and the ambush of forces loyal to Vice President Riak Machar by the RSF illustrates how internal conflicts are becoming entangled with Sudan’s war.
There is no risk of future escalations — it is the current reality: Local coping mechanisms have collapsed, and the conflict is exporting instability, transforming a civil war into a wider transregional conflagration. 

One city conquered fuels the next offensive.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

If neighboring states become directly involved, whether to secure borders, support co-ethnic militias, or protect economic interests, the scale of violence will surge. Naturally, more military involvement brings airpower, external logistics, and proxy forces. Those elements professionalize the conflict in a terrifying way as sieges become more lethal, targeting more precise, and humanitarian access more difficult.
Worse yet, even if the international community had the will and capacity to intervene, at best, the resulting “meddling” would only freeze front lines and permanently divide territory. At worst, it would just widen the war into the Horn of Africa and into the Sahel, sparking instability and disarray across already contested borderlands and vast ungoverned spaces.
On the other hand, we can barely scratch the surface of the catastrophic humanitarian consequences unfolding in Sudan with little to no help forthcoming. When the UN appealed for billions for Sudan’s relief needs this year, it only received roughly a quarter of what it sought. In addition, while the US has been a major supporter of relief historically, funding gaps and access denials today mean food, water, and medicine will never reach many of the people who need them most.
And when aid is blocked, mortality rises quickly, while attacks targeting aid workers and hospitals devastate an already overwhelmed healthcare system for months. There are not just temporary shortages but sustained, layered disasters involving food insecurity, disease outbreaks, and the breakdown of basic services.
There is also an economic multiplier: Darfur’s gold and trade networks are already entwined with armed actors. Territory that the RSF secures becomes a financial prize that can bankroll further operations. That makes negotiated settlements harder and violence more sustainable. In practical terms, we can expect longer sieges, better-supplied militias, and longer periods of stepped-up brutality in areas where strategic resources matter.
Finally, think about social erosion. Communities that survive mass killing suffer long-term disintegration: Elders lose authority, youth are militarized, and intercommunal trust collapses. Rebuilding is never only physical; it is social and psychological. Years from now, towns emptied by ethnic targeting will be harder to repopulate and govern. That is the slow, persistent crime against a nation’s future, one that outlives military wins and losses.
The only realistic short-term policy objective now is harm reduction: insisting on unhindered humanitarian corridors, sharpening forensic documentation to support rapid accountability mechanisms, and squeezing the material lifelines that allow paramilitaries to operate at scale. But do not mistake these steps for a solution. Without a credible effort to deprive commanders of the ability to starve, displace, and reconfigure populations, El-Fasher will be the first of many. The next cities to fall will be measured by the depth of human ruin they leave behind, not mere lines redrawn on a map.
If we are to take away one thing, it is that the immediate future is not about front lines alone. It is about what a paramilitary that practices ethnic cleansing does to the fabric of whole regions, and how that damage spills outward, multiplying suffering and instability across borders. The scale of next-stage catastrophe will be determined less by diplomacy and more by who controls roads, drones, and the means to starve people into submission.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center in Washington and senior fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.
X: @HafedAlGhwell